Content Strategy 101 : Blog Integration

This is a guest post by Andreas Horch. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Setting up a blog is not really that difficult. In fact, the post I made about 11 article and blog post writing tips became so popular for small business owners that it garnered dozens of bookmarks on social bookmarking sites.

But the usual drawback for most people is the integration of the blog itself into your current content strategy. What do you do to solve this problem?

The Side Of The Blogger

As a webmaster or website owner, you should already be used to writing content for your organization, if you are not outsourcing this work. However, you probably would need a little bit more practice on the tone and depth of the voice in your articles, and probably a little filtering work to know which ones you can actually write about legally.

How do you keep afloat amidst all the conflicting priorities in this situation? Being a great project manager is generally considered a plus, but content development is a creative activity. This means that you would need a good amount of dedication and time, which unfortunately you will never always have.

That then leaves us to questions such as: Can a good webmaster or website owner handle the need to form good organic relationships with your target customers? Can the method of buying posts from writers achieve your objective even better? Is interaction necessary for a successful blog? What are the points that prove its necessity?

The Side Of The Non-Blogger

Instead of a conversational and informal blog, some organizations opt to be more formal, specific, technical or scientific when it comes to their posts. They often use subject experts to do these jobs. Let us say that you have the expert tongue to discuss all the technical matters of your expertise in a specialized field, or have a team of brilliant minds within the company that works in the same manner. Why don’t we try to merge these great minds and get them to be active in social media?

This is done in almost exactly the same manner as how one would give a lecture at a seminar, only it is viewed from the web. Discuss this well with your team of experts and plan out a good platform to use as a medium. The rewards can be as great as being well known worldwide without even having to publish a book.
This is the situation where you can be the coach. You’ll have to also do your fair share of background research, competitive analysis, and training for search engine optimization. Get yourself known to your respective field of expertise.

Because you are also technically the publisher of your own website, you might want to have an editorial calendar. It is also recommended that you establish your own cadence, counting the frequency of your posts relative to the time gap between your last post and your most recent post. This can bolster you commitment, and will help you determine the days when you should be writing your next post.

Integration usually happens at a strategic level. The improvement of both social media strategy and communications strategy directly affect each other, so you’ll also need to take note of three aspects.
Try to envision it as this: what’s my objective? Think up ways on how a blog can help you climb higher to extend to other levels of marketing activities. For example, have you heard of a customer saying “I didn’t know that you also do such”? If “that” can be a profitable line of business where you can’t have as much marketing awareness activities on the run, then your goal may be to get the word out on that.

Or let’s just say that you have a region that is unnecessary in your search marketing strategy. The trigger that makes it quite useless might lie in the keywords that you use. Some keywords are too expensive and competitive to used properly, and having too specific topics can just be ignored completely due to the very short attention span of your average web surfer.

Both cases work great for an integration. After finishing the first wave of your strategy, you can now go to trade shows, Webinars, and opt-in newsletters to promote your blog further.

- Setting Goals For The Blog

Look at your objective, create a plan to make these more specific to your social media. For example, at the end of Q2, you should be the “go to” company for a specific item or service. How well have you done your editorial calendar?

You need to map out crucial points in your plans, as well as in your social media activity and even down to the content itself, for you to be able to determine topics that attract and speak to the needs of specific clients or customers.

In coming up with a strategy, you conclude that in this case you’ll use social media to determine and contact your buyers, being the helpful, and personable person that sincerely wants to get to know them better.

It’s going to be especially helpful to keep you in coming up with ideas for content and potential service.

- What To Measure?

Go to a baseline first, and observe performance indicators. For instance, are there more subscribers and comments than before? Are there always people wanting to contact you? Do they sign up for your newsletter?

Company blogs are still in the infancy stage when it comes to the integration of industry conversations and market ecosystem. This means that many content are actually just blog versions of what you can commonly see on other marketing material, press releases or technical bulletins.

Can you become the platform for specific subjects and discussion matters in the industry to examine the offers of many companies and the industry trends in a geographical area (outside the internet)?

Independent consultants ate usually the ones that does this job well. It takes an enterprising person to play well with everyone and keep the market ecosystem at a good chemistry.

About Author :
Andreas Horch is a professional search engine marketing consultant with over 10 years experience in the internet marketing industry and CEO of Linknami.com, a targeted link building system which offers free article marketing and contextual link tools for bloggers and website owners.